Loaded Samples Don't Transpose Upward

Question:I have loaded in some samples from another sampler and they don't transpose across the whole keyboard. What am I doing wrong?

Answer:

In the K2, samples can be played back up to 96kHz. As you transpose a sample up the keyboard the playback rate increases. Therefore, there will be a limit as to how high a sample can be transposed. For example, if a sample was made at 48kHz, you could only transpose up an octave (since frequencies double for each octave). If the sample was made at a lower rate, you would get further upwards transposition.

Normally, this isn't an issue. When you transpose a sample up too far, you can get aliasing, and the sample won't sound natural. Typically, you won't transpose a sample more than a 4th or 5th in either direction. But in the case of loading samples originally created for older samplers, they could typically only hold a small amount of RAM. Therefore, they would tend to stretch samples much further and so you sometimes run into this problem. The only thing you can do is to use the Resample DSP function to do sample rate conversion to convert it to a lower rate (so it will stretch farther). But keep in mind that the highest frequency that you can accurately capture is 1/2 of the sample rate, so if you lower the rate too much, you can lose high frequencies.

On the K2500/K2600, a feature was added called Sample Skipping, to help alleviate some of this. This special technique uses only every other individual sample, and therefore the amount of upwards transposition can be doubled from its normal amount.